[Peter Matteson]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

#35 chain is plenty reliable and competitive for any team, not just rookies. While #25 has its advantages, I'd suggest rookies spend their resources and times developing other aspects of the drive and whole robot rather than worrying about #25 chain just yet. Spend more of those resources on better wheels, transmissions, electronics, or manipulators (or about anything else). Get done with your drive a little bit quicker with the supplied #35 and let your programmers have more time.

The best thing for a rookie to do is come up with a reliable, fully-functioning, usable drive with enough time for their programmers and other sub-systems to have access to the bot to do what work they need to do. That way they can spend more time programming, testing, de-bugging, and integrating the systems, as well as the all important training of the drivers.

Originally Posted by Jeff Waegelin

The takeaway from all of this: especially for drivetrains, most teams will benefit from something simple and reliable. The less experience and assistance you have, the more critical this becomes! The last thing you want is to spend your whole competition season getting the robot to move.

An addendum on the #25 versus #35 question: I consider myself to be a pretty experienced designer, but I will ALWAYS use #35 for drivetrains. It doesn't matter how well you can CAD a drive base, if your fabrication tolerances are not tight enough, you WILL have problems with #25. I will take the reliability and forgiveness of #35 over the weight savings any day. I've seen too many #25 systems fail due to misalignment to do it any other way.

Originally Posted by Doug G

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING FOR A ROOKIE TEAM IS TO GET THEIR DRIVE SYSTEM WORKING BY THE END OF THE THIRD WEEK. Our team was very competitive last year, simple because of it's dependablity and driver practice. Our drive team had over a week of practice before ship.

3) Use innovative ideas to develop a cool manipulator or strategy. There's absolutely nothing more troubling than to have your robot unable to drive.

I think back to the days of 2000, 2001, 2002 when there was no simple drive system that came in the kit. You had some cordless drill motors, transmissions, and skyway wheels that you had to make work. That took our team the bulk of the 6 weeks.

Just wanted to highlight the points that reinforce what I was getting at. Drive is not a system you have to spend all season on anymore. If its your teams first year you're better off driving with what you are given in the kit, and spending the effort on coming up with a way to score points. I love the kitbot for this reason.

Also I agree 25 is strong enough for a drive, but that wasn't the point I was making. I have used both #25 (2004) and #35 (2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008) successfully with only minimal maintenance. As a design mentor I tell the students every year why we use 35, because its more forgiving of tolerances.